Southern Soapbox: Lack of hotel air-conditioning leads to hot time in old New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana -- One of the charms of staying in an old building is to imagining how it must have felt to be there a century or more ago.

Guy Busby

For all our rosy pictures of the past, however, people might have been hot, sticky, uncomfortable and worrying if they were sharing their bed with little crawling vermin.

Sometimes, in their place, understanding those feelings doesn’t take a lot of imagination.

And instead of picturing the romantic past of old New Orleans, my mind on a long night last weekend was filled with a very 21st century thought. The next time I book something on the Internet, I’m going to be a lot more careful.

We were looking for a place to stay during last weekend’s French Quarter Festival. Here was a site just outside the quarter, within walking distance of the celebration.

As we pulled up on Friday afternoon, the hotel, in an antebellum house, looked like it would live out hopes. The carpeting on the stairs up to the registration desk was a bit worn, but that’s part of the charm of old buildings like that. It gives the place a bit of the personality that my wife and I have enjoyed in such places.

From the top of the stairs, the view looked down on a tree-shaded courtyard. This is going to work, I thought.

Then the clerk announced that we were not exactly going to be staying in this building. Instead, we were booked into the “guest house.”

The guest house was a shotgun house a street over. Our room looked out on a narrow sidewalk and board fence that almost blocked the view of the abandoned house next door.

It did have an antique bed with carved wooden headboard. An armoire stood in one corner on the hardwood floor.

Taking up another corner, however, was a portable air-conditioner. The unit produced a lot of noise and a pool of water along the baseboards, but little cool air.

The clerk explained that the window unit had gone out and the portable had been put in as a temporary measure. He was sorry, but with the festival, not only was their hotel full, but every other room in the city was booked.

When we came back that night, the temperature outside was cooler than the room. My wife pulled down the sheets. She stopped, then pulled off the sheets to look at the mattress pad. “It’s filthy,” she said.

The clerk showed up almost an hour later with a new set of sheets and mattress pad. Standing in the 85-degree room, he tried to joke that at least we didn’t need a comforter. When he left, we realized that both sheets, top and bottom, were fitted.

That almost sent us packing, but I talked my wife into staying until morning. There was no sense in getting home in the wee hours of the morning, if we were already here. We were packed and out the door before 6.

A new clerk asked if we wanted them to try to find another room that day. “Definitely not,” my wife responded before I could say anything.

Maybe the silver lining was being out in the city at daybreak. The morning was cool after the long night. We strolled along the river watching the fog roll over the water. We drank coffee off Jackson Square while I watched my wife feed beignet bits to the sparrows.

The hotel had not lived up to expectations, but it takes more than a bad night in a lousy room to destroy the charm of a city or a special trip with someone.

Guy Busby is a reporter for the Baldwin Register. He can be reached at 251-219-5490 or gbusby@press-register.com.